Coastal Storm COULD Bring Snow
By Kate Bilo
By now, everybody has heard about the potential for a coastal storm on Saturday afternoon that COULD bring parts of our area the first snowflakes of the season. We will update as things become more clear but just wanted to send an email detailing our current thinking.
A piece of energy will break off from the storm impacting the Rockies today and move across the Deep South into the weekend. Most of the models take this disturbance across the region rather quickly, and bring it out to sea before the pattern becomes conducive to a coastal path. HOWEVER, the European model, which tends to be one of the more accurate long-range models, put forth a coastal storm solution on Monday and has not veered from that path. As of right now, the only other model to feature this solution is the Japanese model, which, simply put, is not to be relied on (although it may be remembered that the Japanese was the only model to initially back up the Euro in last years' "Day After Christmas" storm which eventually panned out to be a major event for us).
Anyway, I digress. What we're talking about here, if the storm does materialize, is a coastal rainmaker which may be able to tap into some moisture from Hurricane Rina. The storm moving up the coast will encounter a blast of cold Canadian air from the north and west, which may trigger a changeover from rain to snow Saturday evening as the sun goes down and the temperatures plummet back to the 30's.
Even though the setup is technically the same as a Noreaster, I'm personally not too fond of using that word for this particular storm just because of the connotations of it as a major snowstorm event. Temperatures across the area today were well into the 60s, and the ground is just too warm to support any snowfall accumulation. So even in the best (or worst) case scenario, the storm will produce a cold rain across the area through the day Saturday and then a brief changeover to snow could occur at the end of the event, with some big wet snowflakes falling across the region. It will be a cold, wet day but we're not talking shovels and plows.
If the storm moves faster and goes out to sea, Saturday will just end up being cloudy and cold. We'll have to watch the speed at which the disturbance moves from the Rockies toward the East Coast, and we should have a better grasp on this by tomorrow into early Friday once our first storm has been dealt with.
Sorry about the novel, I always intend to keep these brief and then my inner weather geek bursts forth.
